I am trying to model families in a database for tax and other purposes,
and am probably trying to hard. I setup a people table and a base class
person with
name, address, date of birth,etc. Then I create classes of
husbands,wives, children that are all of the person class, and all are
mapped onto the single people table. obviously these are
self-referencing
tables, but I having trouble with the has_many, belongs_to
relationships. I think I am confusing rails to some degree. It would
seem that these would be easy to model, but being a part-time
programmer, I am having troubles. when I use the
has_many (for children) and has_one (for husband,wife) I cannot get
rails to
consistently persist those relationships. I’m also using different names
for the relationship than the class (i.e. belongs_to :father,
:class_name => “Husband”, foreign_key => “father”). I realize that I
don’t have a full handle on how to do this more simply. (or how not to
confuse rails). can anybody point me in the right direction?